Newcomb Hollow Trail - Cape Cod

We first stayed in wellfleet 9 years ago. it was my first time staying overnight in the outer cape.. the forearm of the peninsula. Serendipitously on our first night at a rental house, we found bed bugs on Ben’s mattress. Our family crowded on the only clean mattress in the house marooned sleepless that night. We had to find a different place to stay immediately. While it was annoying to start our vacation breaking a lease and arguing over security deposits and exterminator probes, it turned out, in retrospect, to be the best way to start our love of the cape. we ended up procuring Jack’s house rental on Wood Duck Lane. jack was a longtime local resident originally from nyc who built his house and knew the area well. Jack and i hit it off, and he spoke of his time seeing MLK speaking at his nyc high school, and how he found the salvaged wood to construct his house. More importantly he imparted to us his local knowledge of the area--  “duck harbor beach for sunset, pb boulangerie for sandwiches, nauset beach for the bike trail, cahoon hollow for the cliffs....  A typical tourist may enjoy the mini golf and fried seafood stands on route 6, and maybe a crowded beach, but the true beauty of wellfleet lies in the ponds… the same ponds Thoreau wrote about 170 years ago in his book Cape Cod.”

Wellfleet is 1 only mile wide, straddling the bay and the atlantic. i never knew about ponds. By car, they are easily overlooked and passed in getting to the popular beach destinations. cape cod is a physical record of glaciation. the glaciers pushed the land into the ocean and formed hilly topography. when the glaciers melted 15,000 years ago, they left behind massive holes or "kettles" that later filled with fresh water.  Those kettle holes with a layer of clay beneath them collected water early on, filling up.  You need resident parking permits to visit the kettle ponds in summer and even if you have one, the lots are typically full of people seeking a pond to swim in. Additionally, there are many ponds that you have hike in to gain access. when Jack told me of his early morning swims in such remote ponds we didn't have time to hike these ponds 9 years ago but i always remembered jack's recount of them and envisioned his swims out there. 

Since we got a late start out, we decided to check out a trail that wove through kettle ponds nearby our house. i didn’t expect much… having seen beautiful trails of truro and provinceland, and having visited wellfleet several times over the years, it was hard to imagine something new could appear. We never ventured on these trails, because in summer the brush is overgrown with shrubs and ticks, and mosquitoes eat people alive. but in early spring, when the brush and air are both clear, the trails are perfect. Like the typical cape landscape, we proceeded on a trail behind the beach with pitch pine forests and sandy pine needle floors, skirting behind the backyards of some houses up and down gently sloping hills... It was nice... nothing spectacular, till we came upon Horseleech pond. The sky was clear, out of view of the ocean, the wind through the trees played tricks on our ears and sounded like waves. Sometimes the wind would come in sustained gusts and the surface of the pond would fan out in ripples in different directions. It was like a display of fireworks on the surface of the pond. We stood there waiting for the next wind and the next round of sweeping ripple aquatechnics. My feet froze as I waded in the icy cold and clear water.

We navigated trails that continued between ponds. At intersections, one would see signs of private driveways branching off to the distance. I noted one sign name in particular… Chermayeff. A network of foot paths interlaced with dirt roads which accessed houses. Climbing in grade, we saw a view of 5 cormorants standing on a dock in the middle of herring pond. Stately and black with their unusual posture, they looked like penguins sunning from afar. At the end of the road was a small trail along a stream. Both sides of the stream were raised moss embankments, which felt like soft carpet beneath our weary feet. The green was punctuated with fiddle head ferns. The stream bed was orangish in color. A series of small wooden bridges traversed the stream, and to our delight we spied a school of herring swimming up and down as if in a serpentine lap pool. We walked by the elevated stream bed, till we could no longer advance through thick brush. Had we continued along the stream, we would’ve ended up in wellfleet bay. Some of the deeper freshwater ponds like herring pond are connected by active creeks or brooks to saltwater often serve as the final destination for herring runs.  During the spring, thousands of these alewife fight uphill to their place of origin to lay their eggs and renew the cycle. No wonder we saw the cormorants at this pond. Following the herring as they swam up and down the stream became our unplanned activity of the day. On the map, the trail we were on was represented by a thin blue line tailing off the pond. In reality, it was our fantasy world of spring beech trees, meandering stream with carpets of moss, herring schools and resting cormorants.

Our hike back threaded loops between higgins, gull, and slough ponds, and different intersections of driveways. I saw a driveway sign for halpirin house. To have chermayeff and halprin within the same walk was too coincidental. Chermayeff was a Harvard architecture professor.... Halprin house was designed by Hayden Walling. A search of these buildings yielded there are about 100 or so famous mid-century modern buildings in the outer cape. i knew wellfleet was a hotbed of modern architecture between 1940-70's but i had never seen the houses. they were tucked discretely into the landscape at the ends of long private driveways. this was the vacationland where gropius, breuer, saarinen, and walling would experiment in house design. 

I’ve trespassed on private property and have been yelled at before (i.e., aalto’s summer house)… it's uncomfortable to encounter an angry house owner wanting their privacy annoyed at people taking pictures of their home. yet I headed down the private halprin driveway that explicitly said “No Trespassing” to find the building and an open screen door to its living room. Fearful of being discovered as an intruder, or shot with a rifle, I quickly snapped a photo showing the iconic large suspended noguchi paper globe light of the living room and headed back. 

Up and down the hills, weaving between slough, herring, William and higgins ponds we finally made it to the sands of newcomb hollow beach. I could see the paddleboarders were still in the ocean, waiting for a good wave to surf in on, just the way we had seen them when we had arrived at the trail head earlier in the morning. Just a quarter mile inland from the beach lay secret trails and hidden ponds, pine needle floors and sandy trails, herring runs and moss lined streams.